Video Buffering Problem

Hi can someone help regarding streaming video over wired network ?

I have a WD TV Live connected to my BT Home Hub 3 via a Linksys SE2500 Gigabit ethernet switch and Comtrend 9020 powerline adaptor. Also connected to the ethernet switch is a SKY+ HD box, a BT Vision box and a Sony Blu Ray player.

Connected to my Home Hub I have a 3tb My Book Live which I store my videos on. When trying to watch a video from the My Book Live after about 3 minutes the video starts to buffer (yellow circular arrow) and then stops and buffers every minute or so. The videos are mkv which were encoded using MKV Merge.

My desktop pc is wired to the Home Hub and if I watch a video frrom My Book Live using DivX player there is no buffering or any problems.

I have copied a video to a USB stick and plugged it into the WD TV Live and the video works perfectly from there.

I have tried watching an avi video grom the My Book and there is no buffering at all, but avi videos sound goes out of sync after a while (which is why I converted files to mkv after reading solutions for sync problems on this forum).

I have bypassed the ethernet switch and powerline adapter by plugging the WD TV Live direct to the Home Hub and the buffering problem still happens.

I tried re-encoding an mkv video using Handbrake which took about 2 hours for 1 film :frowning: but when trying to watch this the WD TV Live says file type not supported ???

Coould anyone help regarding any settings or other advice to sort this problem please

Gardon

If you are going to try bypassing something, bypass the Home Hub.  Connect both the My Book and the WD TV Live SMP to the Linksys switch using Ethernet cables.  Does this fix your problem?

The SMP is definitely capable of playing blu-ray res MKV files, as you saw when you put them on the USB stick.  I have no problems playing such files from a Samba share over my network.  So the problem is with your network or at least with how the My Book and SMP interact with it.  My experiments with both “n” wifi and powerline networking was that they were incapable of sustaining the necessary throughput for high bitrate MKV files, so rebuffering occurred.  This should not happen over a wired/Ethernet connection (generally).

Thanks for the above suggestion.
After trying several configurations and bypassing different things I got the problem down to the powerline adapters or my house wiring.
I managed to buy new powerline adapters with the proviso that if it was my house wiring and they didn’t make any difference that I could return them and have my money back. The new adapters worked fine and I’m not having any problems streaming from My Book Live.